This is Gulf Coast Life Im Mike Kiniry, thanks for joining us.

Mac Stone grew up in and around Gainesville and spent a whole lot of time outdoors and in Cyprus swamps in north central Florida.

As a kid, he got his first camera, a film SLR no D in high school, and that sent him down a road he's still on today.

Mac, an award winning conservation photographer and a National Geographic explorer.

He's a contributing photographer for National Geographic magazine and a senior fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers.

His work focuses on swamps and wetlands.

He says he's trying to change public opinions towards these often misunderstood and maligned ecosystems.

His weighty coffee table book, Everglades America's Wetland, was published in 2014, and now his new, also weighty book is Cyprus The Last Old Growth Swamps.

It comes out next month, but we're going to talk about it today.

Welcome back to the show, Mac.

Mike, thanks for having me.

Great to be here real quick.

What's not that weighty?

Not well I mean I don't know.

It's pretty feels pretty weighty to me.

I mean, weighty in a literal sense.

Real quick.

What's it mean to be a National Geographic Explorer?

So National Geographic is bifurcated into two parts.

There is National Geographic Partners, which is the magazine side.

And then there's the nonprofit arm, which is the society side.

That's the National Geographic Society that funds all sorts of grants for scientists, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and the society arm gives out grants that are fairly competitive.

And if you are a recipient of one of those grants and you enter into the National Geographic Society, you are then deemed in National Geographic Explorer.

And so I received a grant.

I've gone on assignment several times for the magazine and and hopefully it will be another recipient of a grant in the future.

So I'm a National Geographic Explorer specifically.

The first grant that I got actually is related to this project, and it was documenting the last remaining old growth swamps left in the American South.

And so this project in this book was really born from from that grant, which helped fund a lot of the work that I was doing, leaving camera traps and flying and traveling and purchasing equipment to be able to tell these complex stories.

In the preface, you talk about how the swamps you grew up in, which seemed so ancient and majestic at the time, turned out to be kind of babies, or at least not all that old, relatively speaking.

Once you got a little bit more experience with what a cypress swamp could be.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure.

I mean, anyone who's been in a cypress swamp and I've been in lots of them, and particularly where I grew up in Gainesville, we have swamps all over the place.

And just by the way that cypress trees look, they look very old, you know, they're contorted and they have knees that kind of these Gothic structures surrounding them, draped in Spanish moss and bent boughs, and they really just look like primeval ecosystems.

And so, you know, as a kid, you never really consider when you're walking through the woods or slogging through the swamp, that it's secondary or tertiary growth.

And that is, in fact, what almost all of it was, because the majority of the FA, FA, FA majority of the Cypress lose and swamps all across the southeast were clear cut.

At one point they were harvested for their wood.

And I say the same thing when you go and, you know, my family grew up going on the Blue Ridge Parkway and you go out into the scenic overlooks and you look at just all that protected land, all those Appalachian forests and oak and hickory forests, and you think, wow, this is true wilderness.

And they are wilderness areas.

But at one point, all of that was clear cut as well.

So we have a long, long history of logging in the southeast.

And cypress in particular was coveted because cypress trees are naturally rot resistant, water resistant, insect resistant.

So at the turn of the 20th century, it was viewed as the naturally occurring, pressure treated wood.

So all of it, nearly all of it, except for what is here in this book, was clear cut and timbered to make way for pilings, decking, sidings, roof, all the outdoor lumber that we use cypress for in the 20th century.

I got an actual chill when I read the caption beneath beneath the first image that you have right after the preface.

So it's I counted it up.

It's 80 by 80 square of these little tiny gray trees.

Each one represents something like 10,000 acres.

And there's one little black tree down in the corner.

And that represents out of 6400 trees, how much is left of what was there before, which is just who came up with the idea for that graphic because it was very impactful.

Thank you.

I did, and my wife Hannah, who's a brilliant graphic designer, made that.

And it's about trying to put into context what was lost and what is left.

Now.

That graphic represents the the, the statistic that there was once an estimated 40 million acres of old growth cypress in the American Southeast, and by the mid about 1930s, between 1930s and 1950s, all but less than one tenth of 1% is left.

So just 10,000 to 12,000 acres, roughly of old growth swamp, are left out of the 40 million acres that once was so abundant in the American South.

And so that's a pretty that's a very staggering number when you consider just how thorough the logging was.

And also when you imagine how difficult some of these places were to reach.

I mean, they would go to any lengths to cut tram roads into the middle of nowhere, you know, out in the fact in the Everglades or nearly all the river corridors of the great southern rivers and basin, mobile basin, all these areas clear cut, just completely clear cut.

I recently did a show all about mangroves with two professors, and in that research I learned that and it kind of makes sense.

But you know, when you really think about it from like Tampa Bay all the way down around to up to like Indian River lagoon used to all be mangroves.

And now there's like probably about the equivalent of the graphic you have in your book left because of human interaction or intercession.

That's right.

You know, these habitats.

It was actually a federal decree from the Swamp Land Act of 1850, congressionally approved act to incentivize states to cut down their cypress, to drain their swamps and wetlands, to make way for more productive or, quote unquote, useful land.

So this was really a all hands on deck effort to transmogrified the southeast into more pastures or more developable land.

And Cypress was one of the first victims of that of that act.

And it continued on into the 1930s and 1940s.

I learned from your book that cypress trees are phylogenetically related to sequoias, which I found interesting, and that in these old growth places that haven't been clear cut, they can get, I think there's one in North Carolina that's almost 2700 years old, right?

Correct.

So, you know, throughout working on this project, I met many biologists, worked with a lot of non-profits and organizations that were working to protect these areas, specifically The Nature Conservancy and Audubon in the National Park Service and in North Carolina in the black River of North Carolina.

There's also a black River in South Carolina, but the black River of North Carolina has one of the most stunning stands of old growth cypress that I've ever seen.

And Doctor Dave Staley is a danger chronology out of the University of Arkansas.

And he is the just like the Encyclopedia of knowledge on cypress trees and their age.

And now it gets really challenging to age cypress trees because older they begin to senescence, and the heartwood in the middle of the tree begins to rot out.

You know, these trees have weathered millennia of hurricanes and storms and fire, and so the heartwood often rots out of these trees, and you only have the living layer, the cambium around the outside.

So in order to date and to be able to prove that a tree is that old, you have to put in an incremental ring borer into the center of the tree and reach the pith to be able to count all the rings.

You know, they put a growth ring every year and cypress trees.

And so Doctor Dave Staley went to the black River and started coring trees and found many of them were hollow on the inside.

And then he reached this one tree known as BLK 227.

And back in this is 2017, he called the tree and it was 2624 years old.

And you know, some time has passed since then.

And he is also surmised that they're probably trees that are older than 3000 years old, but you just can't prove it because of many of their cause.

R r hollow or rotten.

But in order to get a core sample into these trees, you have to put a ladder way up high and get past the base swell of the tree.

You know how they have these fluted bases of cypress trees, so you have to get up high?

So even though he counted that many rings on the tree, in order for the tree to really get that tall, it was probably another 15 years or so.

So there's probably a decade or two of growth that's not even accounted for in that age.

So it's all to say that these trees are incredibly, incredibly old.

Among the oldest in the world.

Right.

The oldest wetland tree species in the old in the world, and the fifth oldest tree species in the world.

I talked with you on the show back in 2021.

You'd won the National Natural History Museum of London's Wildlife Photographer of the year contest, with an image of a mother raccoon carrying her baby through flooded waters.

As I flipped through your book.

I was like, I wonder if any of these pictures were taken around the same time as that one?

And then there's a picture in this book of a mother raccoon carrying her baby.

Is that the photo?

That is the photo.

Now, I didn't win the overall competition I was awarded, and they have many categories.

So I was awarded in one of the categories.

But that image was part of this coverage and it was made right there near you all in Corkscrew Swamp in Naples, owned by National Audubon Society.

And so I spent a considerable amount of time in Corkscrew Swamp.

It's one of the last remaining old growth swamps covered in this book.

And I think it's important to note, you know, all throughout this coverage, I had lots of contact with people that would call me or email me and say, Mac, you know, we have we have a really old cypress tree here on the property that was left from the logging days.

You should come and cover it as part of this project.

And, you know, I had very specific guardrails with this book in that I wasn't trying to I'm not trying to document all the old singular trees that are left.

And there are quite a lot of them all across the southeast.

And they were actually called cull trees.

And there were trees that had no timber value because they were hollow or contorted or twisted.

And there are a lot of these kind of relics of Cyprus swamps that that are around with considerably old trees.

But the focus of this book is really to look at tracks and forests that are still intact, that were never logged, so that you can begin to unravel some of those behavioral mysteries and interactions between species and soil and canopy to get an understanding of how the southeast once looked and functioned.

So that image of the raccoon rescuing its kit from out of season rain from a big flood event is exactly the kind of image I was looking for in for this book and for this project is to try and get glimpses into the intricate and complex and fascinating world that is these old growth cypress swamps and all the little unique occurrences that happen still in these ancient canopies.

So the photos were taken corkscrew swamp here in Collier County.

Francis is a beadle or Byler.

Francis Byler Forest in Harley Ville, South Carolina.

And then Congaree National Park in South Carolina, black River Preserve in North Carolina.

You worked.

If I've got it right out of grad school.

One of your first jobs was at Francis Byler Forest, right?

That's right.

Undergrad?

Yes.

And I worked as a naturalist at Francis by the forest, and is actually my very first time seeing an old growth swamp.

And it's where this whole project started when I got there.

And it's much like Corkscrew Swamp.

There's a beautiful mile and three quarter boardwalk that weaves through the ancient cypress grove, and I just never seen anything like it.

I mean, it is completely different than secondary growth and tertiary growth.

You have clean understory, massive I mean, massive trees and just these really beautiful fluttering of wings of warblers.

And it just feels old.

It looks old and it is old.

And that's really what started this whole book project.

And it took some time, another decade from that time of when, when I started working in earnest to try and identify the last other pockets of old growth swamp.

How old is the oldest picture in this book, if you had to guess?

I mean, are these all taken within the last decade since your last book?

Or some of them date back further?

Well, let's see some of them date back further.

When I first started working, when I worked at Baylor Forest, that was 2009.

So some of the images and there's probably a handful in there from from that season working there started in 2009.

Then I took a long break, started working on other Everglades work, and then began in earnest in this in 2017, 2018.

How big does the cypress tree get around?

Like you talk about massive.

I mean, you know how many men would have to stand arm and hand in hand around it?

Are we talking like 510, you know, is it how big do they get in terms of circumference?

I have a figure in my head that there was one, and I think it's in in Byler.

That's 26ft.

It's there.

However, there's no real correlation between the the girth of the tree and age.

They all they all range.

And it's really about water flow.

So those fluted bases are really to help stabilize the tree and soft sediments or fast moving water.

So there's some cypress trees, you know, on the Swanee floodplain where you have mass, massive pulses of water that are relatively, you know, the age of a cypress tree, relatively young, but are just, you know, you could fill a room with their base.

But the oldest tree, for example, that blk 227 that I talked about there might you might be able to stretch for four people, around 3 or 4 people around the base of the tree, and it doesn't look like, you know, a massive sequoia.

It just looks gnarled and it twisted and contorted by time.

So there's not really that correlation.

You would expect to see a massive, massive tree be the oldest one.

Interesting.

I understand what you mean.

And that's something that I learned today.

I love it, you know.

Is there like you've touched on this but try to put it into words.

Is there a real distinct difference that you feel when you're in a true old growth cypress swamp versus the kinds like that you might have been in as a kid?

Oh, yes.

I mean, I don't know if it's just because I'm really deep in this and I'm a true swamp rat, but the difference is just staggering.

And all of these swamps look very different from one another.

So the difference between, for example, in the tropics you have you have corkscrew swamp.

And so when you stand on that boardwalk and you look outward, there are ferns and epiphytes, and for millions there, there is life everywhere.

And that's because of the level of humidity and because of where it sits in the state.

And so you have this kind of feeling of density, big density.

Whereas if you go up to North Carolina and you go into black River, it's so stunningly different because you have white sand covered with inky black tannic water.

And these massive trees are just sparsely populated throughout.

And then maybe you get a little button bush, or you have some understory trees that that fill in and in these fields of cypress needs.

And it's just really, really, really surprising ecosystem really, and how it looks and how different it feels.

And then also the trees themselves, like if you're looking at a black River, North Carolina tree, they just look very different.

Many of the tops have been blown off, you know, by a hurricane maybe a thousand years ago or 500 years ago.

And then they just keep growing.

They just sprout new branches.

So they have this kind of stunted bonsai look to them.

When you look out, a lot of the tree trunks are kind of twisted and you can see they're the bark veins.

Instead of going straight up, they kind of twist and turn and and then in these high flow areas, like on the black River, the knees can be 12ft tall where you don't really see that in corkscrew, for example, you don't see really, really tall knees because that's a kind of a sheet flow area.

And you're not right next to a big river that would send massive pulses of water through.

So they're all very distinct from one another.

They're all very different.

Congaree, for example, as more of like a clay substrate.

And so you have these big pulses of water along the Congo River that have deposited loads and loads of this kind of clay sediment all around these trees.

So they're all very different.

But what I would say is in terms of how they look as compared to a second secondary growth forest, is they just look more mature.

They look like they've had thousands of years to be in their situation and everything is placed just so it's just there's kind of an order to the chaos.

If you had to guess how many Cypress needs do you think you would have tripped over in your life?

A lot.

A lot.

Yeah, it's it's, you know, in the in the older systems, they're so tall.

And so you just kind of bob and weave through them.

But yeah.

I've hit, I've hit the I've hit the ground quite, quite a lot.

It's just kind of nature of the beast.

And interesting.

That's almost like, you know, if you've got Cypress and you've got little tiny knees, then it's obviously not an old cypress growth.

Well, it could be again, it's just it's really that's all contingent on flow.

It's all it's all about water flow.

And now.

I'm making assumptions again.

Yeah, it really just depends.

It really depends.

Last question I'm going to point out the books dedication reads for McAllen and Hinton.

My greatest adventure.

May the wild always feel like home.

Hoo hoo McAllen and Hinton are the kids.

They are my kids.

My six year old son and my four year old daughter.

And they are on that page.

There is a cicada shell and a cicada, and it has been there.

Their mascot, you know, for the last three years, every spring.

And I can hear them buzzing outside right now, every spring they go on these hunts for cicadas, and it's just like the greatest discovery they make.

And I don't know, I think that's where a lot of this fascination with the natural world came from me is just going out and finding these little miracles that are kind of all around you, and then that then causes you to go a little deeper and a little deeper and a little deeper until you find pockets of inspiration like these places have been for me.

Mac Stone is an award winning conservation photographer and a National Geographic explorer.

His new book is Cypress The Last Old Growth Swamps.

Thanks so much for your time, Mac, and all the work that you did to put this book together.

Mike, thank you so much for having me.

And if I could just say one last thing.

I hope if you get this book, I hope it inspires you to go out and see these places for yourself because they are truly, truly treasures of the American South.

On the web post for today's show, I'll also link the conversation we had with Mac back in 2021, when he was awarded that awarded that he was he made he won that award for the photographer of the year contest out of London with that raccoon photo.

If you missed any of the show, you can always hear episodes in their entirety on our website.

Our show today was produced by Emma Rodriguez, with audio production by Matt Krause and video production by David Oquendo.

For now, thanks for listening.

Im Mike Kiniry.

This is WGCU-FM Fort Myers 90.1 WKMO Marco Island 91.7 FM.

We are NPR for Southwest Florida.